stills
"The future is often described as a toxic breakdown of the human. For Johanna Bruckner, the hybridization of the nonhuman and human is rather a starting point for the indeterminacy and queerness of being. Her video installation shows an entanglement of human, animal, technology, sex, and atmosphere in which molecularization shapes a networked world. The fluid main character is a fictitious sex bot that evokes plastic as a chemical substance impacting biological life; it further performs as a brittle star (a sea creature) as well as nanotechnological beings that distort lovemaking and gender. Pushing the limits of the human sensorium, it invents technological prostheses that redistribute the relations and patterns with which subjects comprehend the world.
Johanna Bruckner’s work is a speculative proposal for new types of interspecies sexuality and subjectivity that could take us beyond oppressive binaries, based on her work Molecular Sex which is currently on view in the group exhibition The Eternal Network at Haus der Kulturen der Welt. Just as quantum computing promises a world of networks in which ones and zeroes simultaneously coexist with one another, Bruckner’s artwork describes a fictive future sexbot that is seemingly able to freely mutate from one state of being to another. Taking its cue from a sea creature called the “brittle star,” this bot is a portrait of social, technological, and bio-chemical entanglements, as they exist in (non)human networks, after the impact of phenomena such as micro-plastics. Following the writings of Karen Barad, the project asks how the molecularization and indeterminacy of being, today, might inform queer and hybrid futures better tooled to deal with current technological, political and ecological changes".
Read full essay by Johanna Bruckner here
Performers: Elma Mateva, Jemima Rose Dean
Camera: Viktor Milushev
Editing: Johanna Bruckner
Digital post-production: Annkathrin Kluss
Sound: Johanna Bruckner
Sounddesign: Philipp Olbrich